Is 1.18 the final straw?

[Mireille]

Hi Mireille,

Good points. I would say one thing that *is* a big mistake, if what you're saying comes true (that the current continent we're on is just the starter areas, so to speak), is that there's already too much *wasted space* currently.

If we're the equivalent of Windy, Sandy and Bastok right now, they really screwed up. How many people go and SP at:

* Lynxpatch Pelt
* Larkscall
* Snakemolt
* Lichenweed
* Woad Whisper Canyon
* Oakwood
* Zanr'ak
* The Red Labyrinth
* Twin Pools
etc., etc.

I would guess the goal was to prevent one camp from being over camped like Kazham, or Gob Hill was in XI, but at the same time we do have exactly that problem at Nanawa Mines and Camp Horizon because people hate to travel to Gridania. What I don't know, because I can't do a '/sea all,' is how many people are really logged in at any given time, so maybe if the active player base goes up people will exp in those locations, or move back to their starter city in self defense.

At launch a lot of camps that are empty now were packed then. Players would use Tranquil or Nine Ives now if they didn't congregate in Ul'dah and have to run across 5 zones to get there. That's a soluble problem though, and the eventual addition of a mount system may open up some camps that no one uses now. Some camps are just absurdly hard to get too like the flux near camp tranquil being guarded by rank 80 dragons. If for example we get airships, or flying mounts of some sort, a large world becomes a lot smaller in terms of travel, and agro won't block us from even acquiring a flux. We also haven't begun to see real content updates so who is to say all that wasted space will be wasted in a year.

The flux system in place is similar to what they do in abyssea except Anima takes a dumb amount of time to regen considering its the only fast travel available. There is no eqivalent of the teleport crags, that you could tele-taxi to for 1k, at the middle point to Jeuno/Sandy/Valk and made getting to a pt much easier. We burn all our anima as it regens and run everywhere. It might make more sense to have anima work more like cruor where you earn it through a variety of mechanisms instead of over time, but at the same time I think its not intended to be the only system that gets you to a location quickly. It was just supposed to be a beginning, but then the other methods ended up in terminal delay mode.

Bottom line a lot of stuff that could have made those camps functional, and for that matter Gridania and LL as home bases functional, is now on hold, so people hang out in Ul'dah and overcamp the stuff nearby.

[Kiara]

At launch a lot of camps that are empty now were packed then. Players would use Tranquil or Nine Ives now if they didn't congregate in Ul'dah and have to run across 5 zones to get there. That's a soluble problem though, and the eventual addition of a mount system may open up some camps that no one uses now. Some camps are just absurdly hard to get too like the flux near camp tranquil being guarded by rank 80 dragons. If for example we get airships, or flying mounts of some sort, a large world becomes a lot smaller in terms of travel, and agro won't block us from even acquiring a flux. We also haven't begun to see real content updates so who is to say all that wasted space will be wasted in a year.

The flux system in place is similar to what they do in abyssea except Anima takes a dumb amount of time to regen considering its the only fast travel available. There is no eqivalent of the teleport crags, that you could tele-taxi to for 1k, at the middle point to Jeuno/Sandy/Valk and made getting to a pt much easier. We burn all our anima as it regens and run everywhere. It might make more sense to have anima work more like cruor where you earn it through a variety of mechanisms instead of over time, but at the same time I think its not intended to be the only system that gets you to a location quickly. It was just supposed to be a beginning, but then the other methods ended up in terminal delay mode.

Bottom line a lot of stuff that could have made those camps functional, and for that matter Gridania and LL as home bases functional, is now on hold, so people hang out in Ul'dah and overcamp the stuff nearby.

Hi Mireille,

Oh definitely. Yah, it seems like those rarer, unused camps I'm talking about were definitely for Level Cap Increase, or set aside for some expansion later, but like your flux example, most of the camps I'm talking about have R70 - 90 Mobs guarding them, and are basically unusable right now.

And even if they "rebalance" it later, and have lower Rank Mobs there, I worry that it'll still be a disappointment since those camps are mostly copy & pasted Textures and Geometry of earlier Camps (so that players suddenly able to go to, say, Lynxpatch Pelt, will feel really underwhelmed at the "New Camp," because it's just more of the same Black Shroud / Gridania textures (same grass, same vegetation, etc.).

(On a side note, it's sad that some mobs like the Doomvoid Guivre are unbalanced, because they look so cool! They have an attack that is epic enough to be worthy of being what a Black Mage / Conjurer's "Thunder IV" should look like! )

Just wondering what they'll do with these, because like you brought up earlier, I'm anxious to see new Continents and visually distinct zones from what we have now.

[Mireille]

Hi Mireille,

Oh definitely. Yah, it seems like those rarer, unused camps I'm talking about were definitely for Level Cap Increase, or set aside for some expansion later, but like your flux example, most of the camps I'm talking about have R70 - 90 Mobs guarding them, and are basically unusable right now.

In a sense its like you took la thiene plateau and made it five times as big by clone stamping it 4 times. You are right it would be neat if the higher level camps had unique features or each zones sub-regions had their own unique character. It sounds like we are getting that with the new camps in a patch soon, and hopefully that's the first of many similar updates.

To me right now FFXIV has a lot of little things wrong with it, and when you add them all together collectively they create something below the standards people have for the franchise. Little things should be correctable though, and it seems to me like they have been correcting them over time. Too many of the players want it to happen all at once, and have no concept of what software development takes. This isn't a small software project either. MS Word doesn't need play balancing, content updates, or anti bot/rmt taskforces.

They took care of some of the major problems, like the non functional wards, and the broken targeting system, so I see no reason to think that over time the remaining issues won't be addressed. Its just not going to happen with a wave of a magic wand. There was a recent post titled something like 'if you could have 1 wish' and only 1 person in 18 pages said they wanted an auction house, so SE must have done something right with their ward fixes. At launch the wards were about the worst thing in the game, and now it seems like they are a non-issue. Well ok some will only accept a traditional AH no matter how well the wards work, but SE undoubtedly isn't wasting effort tweaking the wards for that subset of the players. Targeting is no worse now than it was in XI, and people live with that to this day. What most people seemed to want were specific content items like mounts, mog houses, and challenging battles. Yoshi-P is just starting to bring that in. I say 6 months to a year to finish fixing the game, and if you cant hack that take a break. Those fixes will include some new content that realizes this teams artistic vision for the game, so it won't just be the same boring leve over and over.

[Mack]

They took care of some of the major problems, like the non functional wards, and the broken targeting system, so I see no reason to think that over time the remaining issues won't be addressed.

If that's the case I hope those aren't a sign of things to come.